


a piece in their game

by MathildaHilda



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Book/Movie 2: Catching Fire, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Mockingjay, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 13:49:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15996494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: They’d buried her parents in unmarked graves.That was the extent of what she knew about life days after her victory when she was still running around with a smirk on her lips and a crown on her head and had the whole Capitol eating out of the palm of her hand.She wonders if they’ll bury her the same way.





	a piece in their game

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Peeta's quote in The Hunger Games; "To show the Capitol that they don't own me. That I'm more than a piece in their games."
> 
> WARNING: This story deals with a bunch of torture, most of it mentioned in the books. It's brutal and explicit in some parts, so beware!

They’d buried her parents in unmarked graves.

That was the extent of what she knew about life days after her victory when she was still running around with a smirk on her lips and a crown on her head and had the whole Capitol eating out of the palm of her hand.

She wonders if they’ll bury her the same way.

 

 

 

The first time, she had cried and had had to be pried away from her sister’s arms.

The second time, she had laughed and stared into the camera like the mad woman the Capitol knew her as and she’d kept staring until the Peacekeepers had dragged her off stage and forced her on a train off to her death.

Again.

She survived, but who’s to say she made it out?

 

 

 

She wakes up to stark, bright light and a pounding headache and screams that don’t belong to her.

There’s shallow water on the floor and she rests in a bed of metal and all she can do is laugh and keep listening because nothing can shut out the screams.

The first shock comes after an hour, when she sits in the corner closest to the boy’s room and she screams her throat raw and listens as Peeta pounces on the wall. He begs them to stop, pleads even, but it all fades away from her as her eyes flicker and the shocks stop.

They can’t see each other, but they can hear more than enough and she curls into a ball underneath the bed after the first few shocks and listens to Annie’s tears and Peeta’s pleas and Enobaria’s never ending curses.

Peeta grows quiet after a while but Annie never stops and Enobaria takes out her frustration on whatever equipment they left in her room.

Johanna thinks she has nothing left to say.

 

 

 

After a while someone steps into her room and she thinks someone does the same in Peeta’s, because something crashes in his room and the boy eventually screams when something snaps loud enough for the sound to reach her.

They sedate her and she’s dragged out on her knees, her eyes slits as they catch the pale face of Peeta, lying whimpering outside his room.

She thinks he whispers her name but there’s nothing but loud buzzing in the moments before she passes out.

She thinks that maybe they shouldn’t have gone quiet. That maybe then the Capitol would have left them alone.

 

 

 

She comes back to a room dry of every drop of water. The bed’s gone too.

The door slams shut and she screams until her voice gives out and she can’t talk for two days.

Peeta is always quiet.

Up until the moments that he’s not. And those are the moments that Johanna wishes that this was just some lucid nightmare and that she would eventually wake up in her other nightmare of having to lead kids by the hand to their deaths.

She’s heard too many kids scream to be able to fully shut out the sounds.

 

 

 

They shave her head on the third day after they took her out last time and put rubber in her mouth and she wishes they hadn’t so that she could bite her tongue off and stop the screaming.

Peeta’s been in and out of his room several times every day and he comes back even quieter and louder and broken. Annie’s sobs are mostly gone and Enobaria has taken to heated debates with guards through her door.

They take Peeta because of who he is. They know what older Victors are capable of, but they know the effect Lover Boy has on the nation.

The Rebels have the Mockingjay.

The Capitol has the one that can turn words around.

 

 

 

The Capitol wants a Propo for the Districts and the people of the Capitol so they snatch her in the middle of what she assumes is night from where she is sleeping in a corner, hands clasped over her ears against the endless silence. They drag her out and she’s too weak to struggle.

They paint and dress and cut and prod until she looks like she lived her best life in the Capitol. As if she wasn’t a shell of something that the Capitol took too young and too long ago and never gave back.

Peeta’s there and she wants to scream again but screaming means pain and the pain is never for her. He looks at her and his mouth is open until it is closed by the jagged point right below his chin.

Their voices have consequences when their voices are used wrong. Her mother used to say, with a smile, that children never learned and that was how it was supposed to be. She never learned, she doesn’t want to, and now she pays the piper.

They are angry at her, but it’s nothing compared to the rage they have for the girl running around with body armor and arrows in the Districts, blowing up hovercrafts and bombing hospitals, according to the bullshit the Capitol vomits around them.

They’re dressed impeccably in white, innocent until you look too closely or see something that isn’t real. Her dress is tight and itches, but that’s hardly the main problem. Peeta’s voice is lost and so is her ability to move with the point stabbing into the small of her back, forcing her to stay still, too still, and remain a possession.

She’d prefer being a tree any day if it meant she could get out of that dress.

 

 

 

Peeta starts screaming again. Her heart clenches but she can’t find it in herself to shut it out or take it in. The screams remain there, a reminder that they’re just another piece of property of the Capitol.

She doesn’t realize until she hears a loud bang that they’ve turned the otherwise opaque wall into solid glass, allowing her to see into the hell that came with being Peeta Mellark. His nose is bleeding from where he hit the wall too hard and there are tears in his eyes and Johanna didn’t think that this much rage existed inside her.

The boy shakes and she stumbles over her own feet in an attempt to comfort, because yes she is very much capable of that, but she doesn’t get far as she smacks into the glass with palms pressed flat.

He pleads for the Mockingjay and she bangs on the glass until they grow tired of him and enter her room and pull her away.

It’s Peeta’s turn to bang on the glass and there is needles and sharp things and hot and cold and too much of everything and all she can do is scream.

She loses her voice again and she curls so far away from the door as she can and her eyes are locked with his until the boy is gone again and he comes back with swollen eyes, a broken nose and a cut lip.

They leave him against the glass and all she can do is stare.

 

 

 

There’s smoke but no fire and she laughs when she sees the black little bugs skittering into her little hole of blood and light and grime with their little guns and flashes of light. They haul her to her feet and pull her out, hands rough but not unkind. Just hurried.

Annie’s eyes flicker and she chews on her nails and Peeta stares at nothing. She stares at Peeta’s blond hair caked with blood.

They lay them down on stretchers on the floor and she listens to the whirring of engines and the whispering voices of the Rebels. Her mind pretends that they’re Capitol and her body remembers the pain and never stops shaking until Thirteen sends a medic with a syringe and they have to hold her down to make her sleep.

She wakes up to Peeta’s rage and fear, the sound of shouting and the sound of flesh against flesh.

A man she doesn’t recognize, hardly out of being a boy, carries a gurgling Mockingjay by her bed and she sees the purple flowers blooming across her neck.

 

 

 

She doesn’t remember when Enobaria disappeared from the Capitol. All she knows is that she never heard the woman in Thirteen and never saw her once in the Capitol and that she looks healthy and just as bloodthirsty.

Johanna hates her until the woman agrees to the Games.

 

 

 

The Mockingjay doesn’t hold onto her promise and that becomes the last time she sees her. The boy holds a pill in his hand and toothmarks brands the back of his hand and for a moment she grows afraid that the kid will swallow and die beside their enemy.

But the boy only stares after the Mockingjay and she doesn’t see him again once she’s pushed behind the angry riots of the people.

 

 

 

She goes home to the trees and the dirt and she shuts off the water and refuses to go to the lake where she kissed a boy for the first time.

She climbs the trees and stays for hours, watching sunrises and dew and owls and thinks of Blight and Finnick and every kid she’s followed into death. She thinks of the boy with one leg and the girl with a spitfire mouth and she thinks that maybe they did finally win the Games and that every nightmare now is worth it.

Her hands still shake at the sound of running water and when the screen turns to static and a bulb goes out. The Capitol didn’t kill her, neither did the Games, but she wonders how much of her is still her.

She kisses a girl on the steps to the lumber factory and she holds her hand when she steps into the lake the first time.


End file.
